LAUSR

When simulating blood flow in intracranial aneurysms, the Newtonian model seems to be ubiquitous. However, analyzing the results from the few studies on this subject, the doubt remains on whether it is necessary to use non-Newtonian models in wall shear stress (WSS) simulations of cerebral vascular flows. Another open question related to this topic is whether different rheology models would influence the flow parameters for ruptured and unruptured cases, especially because ruptured aneurysms normally have morphological features that could trigger non-Newtonian phenomena in the blood flow due to low shear rates. The objective of this study is to investigate such flows. By using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in an open-source framework, we simulated an equal number of ruptured and unruptured patient-specific aneurysms to assess the influence of the blood modeling on the main hemodynamic variables associated with aneurysm formation, growth, and rupture. Results for wall shear stress and oscillatory shear index and their metrics were obtained using Casson and Carreau-Yasuda non-Newtonian models and were compared with those obtained using the Newtonian model. We found that the wall shear stress at peak systole is overestimated by more than 50% by using the non-Newtonian models, but its metrics based on time and surface averaged values remain unaffected. On the other hand, the surface-averaged oscillatory shear index (OSI) is underestimated by more than 40% by the non-Newtonian models. In addition, all differences were consistent among all aneurysms cases irrespective of their rupture status.